Which Brooklyn Neighborhoods Have the Best Job Access?

Last week, NYU’s Rudin Center of Transportation released a detailed report about which neighborhoods in the city have the best—and worst—job access for residents. And—surprise!—many of the places with the worst access to jobs are also those with either limited access to subways and buses and/or extremely long commutes to the neighborhoods with the most employment opportunities. These are, not coincidentally, also the areas with proportionally small numbers of college graduates and higher levels of poverty.

What’s that, you say? You didn’t need a study to tell you that? Cool. Neither did we. In fact, it seems kind of obvious to us that Brooklyn Heights/DUMBO would have the best job access in the borough and Flatlands would have the worst. (Where’s Flatlands, you ask? Exactly.) That said, there actually are a great many surprises contained within the report (which can also be seen via this pretty cool interactive map). For example, while it might seem obvious that an affluent neighborhood with access to virtually every subway line and a short commute to both dowtown and midtown Manhattan like Brooklyn Heights would rank pretty high on this list (it’s 27th in the city, out of 177 neighborhoods), it was kind of shocking to see that parts of East New York (#71) actually have better access to jobs than does Park Slope (#72), Windsor Terrace (#82), or Clinton Hill (#73). And even stranger, the study shows that is the “neighborhoods with some, but not sufficient transit access—those in the middle third—[that] faced higher rates of unemployment than those in the top or bottom third.”

So what does this all mean? I guess, in part, that you should feel incredibly lucky to live near a really good subway line, but you should feel even luckier if you can just convince your boss that the best possible option is for you to work remotely all the time, so that you never even leave your apartment at all. Ever. That’s our plan anyway. We think it’ll turn out juuuusssst fine.